Students Exam Quotes

Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam? Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.

When students cheat on exams it's because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

Diocesan exams are given at the end of March to students in Catholic schools throughout Massachusetts from the fourth to the twelfth grade. You have to answer four out of seven essay questions. A typical question goes something like this: Theologians speculate about whether Christ actually appeared to His disciples after He rose from the dead. Is the scripture clear on this? Discuss, with reference to the different gospels and their variations, and to different theological interpretations

Lots of my dying patients say they grow in bounds and leaps, and finish all the unfinished business. But assisting a suicide is cheating them of these lessons, like taking a student out of school before final exams. That's not love, it's projecting your own unfinished business

The heart is a classroom. The soul is a teacher. The mind is a student. Life is the exam.

School exams are memory tests, in real-world no one is going to stop you from referring a book to solve a problem.

Students who were harder on themselves for procrastinating on their first exam were more likely to procrastinate on later exams than students who forgave themselves. The harder they were on themselves about procrastinating the first time, the longer they procrastinated for the next exam! Forgiveness—not guilt—helped them get back on track.

If you fail an examination, it means you have not yet master the subject. With diligent study and understanding, you will succeed in passing the exams.

The world is a classroom, nature is our teacher, life is our exam, and death is our graduation. The world is a sage, humanity are its students, the universe is a master, and gurus are its graduates.

There was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they'd all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered — that was real.

My usual instruction to students when they are preparing to write their examinations is "think before you answer the questions". I am convinced that some multiple choice answers could be so close that you might not know the very one that answers the question correctly! Such is life. To choose your suitable dreams, you must think well!

You don’t really need to be intelligent to be a 'top student.' All that you have to do is to forget the least in an exam.

The heart is a classroom, the soul is a teacher, the mind is a student, and life is the exam. The world is a university, the universe is our professor, wisdom is our homework, and love is our final exam. Life is an academy, God is the instructor, character is the assignment, and virtue is the exam.

forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students' progress.

Life has always been an open-book exam

The difference between a good and a poor student is result

Three days ago, I was fired from my job teaching at a college because one of my students bet me that you don’t cum when you get a prostate exam and it took me seven minutes to prove that dumb fucking kid wrong. It was hard to touch my own prostate, but ultimately, I was correct. I came onto the floor and onto the person in the desk up front. I said, “Kids, that is what is known as ‘empirical evidence’.

Both of these students- both high school seniors both old enough to vote in the upcoming election- thought 'Al' Qaeda was a person. At that time the United States had been at war for five and a half years and here were two students two young adults leaving the educational system who had never heard of al Qaeda. Both by the way had passed the multiple-choice reading section of the state's high school exit exam.

Education derives from the verb educe, which means “to draw forth from within.” The original teaching method of Socrates has been largely displaced by professorial deference to received scholarly authority. By and large, our students are taught how to take exams but not to think, write, or find their own path.

These works are handed down from teacher to pupil, from parent to child, almost without question, like DNA. They are memorized, recited, discussed in book reports, included in university entrance exams, and once the student is grown up, they become a source for quotation. They are made into movies again and again, they are parodied, and inevitably they become the object of ambitious young writers’ revolt and contempt.

If a student commits suicide because they couldn't bear the pressure of education, it's not a sign of their weakness, but that of the system of education.

Fear is the absence of reasoning.

Use two-way communication on oral exams to check the students' knowledge, not their attitudes. Checking attitudes can lead to the slippery area of subjective assessment.

Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren't doing so well in class are at even higher risk - students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students. In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adam speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students' grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams.

Valuing reading” is often a euphemism for preparing students to pass mandated multiple-choice exams, and in dragging students down this path, schools are largely contributing to the development of readicide.

A great professor considers his student's success as a reflection of his own. He will not remain indifferent in the case of continuous poor exam results, but will do as much as possible to overcome such a situation.

Until when will the poor youngsters be obliged to listen or to repeat all day long? When will they be given some time to reflect on this accumulation of knowledge, to be able to coordinate [find a pattern in] this endless multitude of propositions, in these unrelated calculations?...Students are less interested in learning than passing their exams.

Having neurons wire together can be a good thing. A positive experience with a math teacher can lead to neural connections that link math with pleasure, accomplishment, and feeling good about yourself as a student. But the opposite is equally true. Negative experiences with a harsh instructor or a timed test and the anxiety that accompanies it can form connections in the brain that create a serious obstacle to the enjoyment not only of math and numbers, but exams and even school in general.

Exams make the students tired and exam-duties make the teachers exhausted. So, there should be an official vacation for at least 15 days after the end of mid-term & final exams in private universities so that the students and teachers can relax and freshen themselves up!

Walter amused them with a story of one of his students who had been caught cheating; the boy wrote some formulas for algebraic equations on his hand, and then rested his cheek in the same hand, as he worked on the exam, only to finish with the inked answers stamped across his face.

Think back to when you were a student. Someone likely told you to get a good night’s sleep and to eat a healthy breakfast before a test or final exam. The theory is, you need to be fresh to perform well. However, while getting sound sleep the night before a test is a good idea, it is too late to help you on the test. The real benefit comes from getting good sleep as you learn throughout the year, so the information can be encoded in your memory each night. If you file everything away properly as you go along, this knowledge will be there for you when you need it most.

The bus I am riding on must be on its way to a garbage convention. Never before has a more rancid assemblage of people congregated. I am at this moment privy to a momentous moment in the history of human smell. My name will probably be memorized by future students, preparing to answer this frequently asked exam question: Who demonstrated a supernatural ability to remain conscious on the most disgusting vehicle to ever disturb our debauched world?

I tried to bunked classes, I skipped lectures, I cheated in exams, I lied to my teachers and some stuff were taken for granted when I was a student before. I am not proud about it. Of course, I learned from that experience. I learned that everyone has a chance to change. It doesn't mean that if I am dumbass before and you call me the same thing now. Because now, I work hard, play the game well and strive for excellence. This is me now, a guy with a strong grit in my heart.

To realize the value of 1 week, ask an editor of a weekly newspaper. To realize the value of 10 years, ask a newly divorced couple. To realize the value of 4 years, ask a graduate. To realize the value of 1 year, ask a student who has failed their final exam. To realize the value of 9 months, ask a mother who has given birth to a stillborn. To realize the value of 1 mont, ask a mother who has given birth prematurely. To realize the value of 1 minute, ask a person who missed the train, bus or plane. To realize the value of 1 second, ask a person who has survived an accident. To realize the value of freedom ask a person who's in prison. To realize the value of success, ask a person who has failed. To realize the value of a friend, relative, family member or partner, LOSE ONE." Time waits for no-one, treasure every split-second.

The complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level. As a result, we retain information longer than we would by tapping it into an app.18 In one study, college students who were asked to take lecture notes by hand tested better on average than those who had typed out their notes. They were also able to better retain this information long after the exam.

What did the TEACHER tell the students ? PASS THE EXAMS WITHOUT FAIL.

A college offers a course that prepares students for the state licensing exam for real estate brokers.

Time is still too complicated for us to comprehend and we cannot define it using our wristwatches, nor by using the big clocks on the wall.

Day and night are nothing more than illusions before our eyes.

I am failed for some subject in exam But my friend passed in all , Now he is a college students And I am author and ethical hacker ,

Knowledge is a beautiful thing that can fill us with happiness. Let’s just think about our students who answered brilliantly to questions on various exams.

Food comas - known as postprandial somnolence by people who liked to get bean up during recess - are fine when you're relaxing with friends or family, but they're a major setback when you have exams and papers to write.

Back in Cambridge, the bank clock read 8:40. We went to Ivan’s dining hall. The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered.

And there was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they’d all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered—that was real.

There is no greater beast than envy, no greater thief than fear, no greater enemy than greed, no greater predator than wrath, and no greater poison than bitterness. There is no greater student than curiosity, no greater professor than intelligence, no greater schoolbook than experience, no greater exam than understanding, and no greater classroom than life. There is no greater preacher than integrity, no greater warrior than courage, no greater friend than contentment, no greater angel than mercy, and no greater medicine than love.

This sudden sharpening of our attention doesn’t just apply to pioneering artworks. It can be seen in an ordinary high school classroom. In a recent study, psychologists Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka Vaughan teamed up with teachers, getting them to reformat the teaching handouts they used. Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents, reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense , the florid , or the zesty . These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention, to slow down, and to think about what they were reading. Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.21 Most of us don’t have

Not great, young lady. Mr. Yates intentionally creates exams that challenge the abilities of his students. In twenty years, he’s never given a perfect score. Do you see the problem?” I couldn’t quite bite back my instinctive reply. “A teacher who designs tests most of his students can’t pass?

You may ask whether I have changed my own educational practice and assessment. I have. There are no “final” exams at the end of the semester in my classes. Instead, I split my courses up into thirds so that students only have to study a handful of lectures at a time. Furthermore, none of the exams are cumulative. It’s a tried-and-true effect in the psychology of memory, described as mass versus spaced learning. As with a fine-dining experience, it is far more preferable to separate the educational meal into smaller courses, with breaks in between to allow for digestion, rather than attempt to cram all of those informational calories down in one go. In

Integrity and manliness." what Marcus Aurelius learned from his father and what I learned from my father. "Anger cannot be dishonest." - Marcus Aurelius My father Dr Rabindra Nath Das would get angry at his patients when they came to him for treatment. And I get angry when my students make mistakes and don't take exams seriously.

Some hold the position that education is serious, but games are not; therefore games have no place in education. But an examination of our educational system shows that it is a game! Students (players) are given a series of assignments (goals) that must be handed in (accomplished) by certain due dates (time limits). They receive grades (scores) as feedback repeatedly as assignments (challenges) get harder and harder, until the end of the course when they are faced with a final exam (boss monster), which they can only pass (defeat) if they have mastered all the skills in the course (game). Students (players) who perform particularly well are listed on the honor roll (leader board).

This book will take you into a world far more wonderful than the world of work and entertainment. At university I try to make converts by assigning works of literature that shed light on human psychology, history or philosophy. Some students respond by asking me to give them lists of books. Well, here is your list. But I also want to make converts of those who have not yet gone or will never go to university. The educational establishment may ignore you but I will not. I remember my own family and how they educated themselves. Many in my running club have never been to university. Some of them are among the most intelligent and intellectually curious people I know. Some of them are better informed than university students about almost everything, except the narrow knowledge a graduate gets from majoring in physics or commerce or engineering. Some of my running companions know who Hitler was. As for my students, I once set an exam question about tyranny in the twentieth century. Only a few students could volunteer Hitler’s name.

For example, if a college student fails a midterm exam, she might view herself as less capable and view the class as more difficult, making her more worried and less confident about doing well on the final. While some students might knuckle down and work harder as a result, others might become so intimidated they begin to question whether they can pass the class at all.

Studying for the GRE®? Essay-Girls provides students with sample essay responses for the Analytical Writing section of the exam.   Presented herein are 15 sample essays to aid in study for GRE®. As the essay prompts are property of ETS, they can be found on the ETS website yet are not presented herein. However, each sample essay’s thesis statement is in bold.   Now, get studying!

The present model of education reflects the age in which it was designed: the industrial revolution. Students are educated in an assembly line to make their standardized education efficient. They are asked to sit in nice neat rows, listen to an “expert” expound on a subject, and recall the learned information on an exam. Yet somehow, in this climate, all students are expected to receive the same education.

ou must make friends with at least one student from the year above you. This is so that you learn the secrets of how to pass exams. You can learn about the grading methods of the teachers in this way. In addition, find one classmate of the same year who is very talented and become best friends with him. Have him lend his notebook to you, and during exams, have him sit right next to you. Those two are all you need for school friends.

In the evening we shall be examined on love.” –St. John of the Cross And it won’t be multiple choice, though some of us would prefer it that way. Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on when we should be sticking to the point, if not together. In the evening there shall be implications our fear will change to complications. No cheating, we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure out the cost of being true to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested like defendants on trial, cross-examined till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No, in the evening, after the day has refused to testify, we shall be examined on love like students who don’t even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart and not off the top of their heads. And when the evening is over and it’s late, the student body asleep, even the great teachers retired for the night, we shall stay up and run back over the questions, each in our own way: what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now to look back and know we did not fail.

The Sorting Hat is notorious for refusing to admit it has made a mistake in its sorting of a student. On those occasions when Slytherins behave altruistically or selflessly, when Ravenclaws flunk all their exams, when Hufflepuffs prove lazy yet academically gifted and when Gryffindors exhibit cowardice, the Hat steadfastly backs its original decision. On balance, however, the Hat has made remarkably few errors of judgement over the many centuries it has been at work.

SIR—In this computer age one becomes accustomed to seeing traditional standards fall away before the sacred cows of progress, efficiency and speed … Much as I recognise the need for speedy marking of examinations, I fail to see why students should be deprived of the right to justfy their opinions for the sake of speed and economy. I would rather see exam results a month late than have a student’s right to disagree without penalty lost. Malcolm Turnbull Point Piper.70 It

...he had also acquired a peculiar academic quirk. During exams, he knew all the answers but wasn’t able to successfully map his answers to the right questions. So as soon as an exam started, he simply started putting his answers in the order in which he remembered them. Every time he moved to a new class, his parents made the new teachers aware of this snag. The teachers acknowledged it and reassured the parents that they’d match his answers against the appropriate questions.

If you want to understand what a year of life means, ask a student who just flunked his end-of-the-year exams. Or a month of life: speak to a mother who has just given birth to a premature baby and is waiting for him to be taken out of the incubator before she can hold him safe and sound in her arms. Or a week: interview a man who works in a factory or a mine to feed his family. Or a day: ask two people madly in love who are waiting for their next rendezvous. Or an hour: talk to a claustrophobia sufferer stuck in a broken-down elevator. Or a second: look at the expression on the face of a man who has just escaped from a car wreck. Or one-thousandth of a second: ask the athlete who just won the silver medal at the Olympic Games, and not the gold he trained for all his life. Life is magic, Arthur, and I know what I'm saying because since my accident I appreciate the value of every instant. So I beg you, let's make the most of all the seconds that we have left.

But what if that failed midterm also happened to be the first exam they ever took in college? What if they perceive not just the class but college as a whole as being a greater challenge than they’re able to meet? Since they’re unaware that failing the midterm has distorted their perceptions (such that the class and college appear harder than they actually are), they might reach premature and inappropriate decisions as a result. Indeed, many students drop out early in their freshman year for this exact reason

Cows, by virtue of the plentiful and varied bacteria in their rumen, are able to derive energy from things that would pass through a human undigested. The prune pit has a hard, nutritionally blank hull, but the embryo inside provides protein and fat. Rumen bacteria can break down the hull and free these nutrients, though it takes them a few days. DePeters showed me one of the mesh bags. “Sometimes I put a midterm exam in there,” he said. Cows can’t digest wood pulp. “I tell my students, ‘The cow didn’t digest that material any better than you did.

Assembly-line instruction is what hap-pens in many schools. Learning is separated from productive activity. Kids are separated from families and most other adults and have little agency to decide how and when they’ll plug into the learning process. The content is decided by experts far removed from the community. Kids may have no idea why they’re learning this content, nor any idea how to apply it, but the broader society has deemed it important. Students are expected to ingest the content and later they are sorted ac-cording to how accurately they can parrot back this content on exams.

They Harry Potters still enormously outnumber the likes of Petunia and Vernon Dursley in society, who just don't hold with such nonsense, perhaps reflecting how modern life seems more out of control than ever. Most people do indeed believe in magic of one sort or another, whether the thespian who shouts "break a leg" at a colleague, the student who always wears the same outfit for exams, the blushing bride who crosses her fingers for good luck or those who jump with joy when they find a four-leaf clover. Why is our belief in magic so deeply ingrained? Indeed, why do we believe in anything at all?

Kate is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu. Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she’d arranged to do, with some mega-industrialist tycoon I’ve never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for and one essay to finish, and I’m supposed to be working this afternoon, but no—today I have to drive 165 miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our university, his time is extraordinarily precious—much more precious than mine—but he has granted Kate an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extracurricular activities.

since I really had no knowledge of American literature. Here and there, I had read a book by Upton Sinclair or Jack London or Sinclair Lewis. Here I was among all top American students, the only foreigner. I had to catch up so much, that by the time the written exam approached, I read a book daily. I completed the master's in three semesters, from February 1948 to June 1949. During the summer months of 1949, I wrote the thesis, which was accepted in October of that year. Imagine, in such a short time to read all of Henry James, Willa Cather, all of Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck and more and more. Of course, lots of poetry: T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and many more. Well, once I started, I just went ahead non-stop.

Students who take Latin are more proficient and earn higher scores on the verbal SAT exam. The business world has long recognized the importance of a rich vocabulary and rates it high as evidence of executive potential and success. Understanding the etymological history of a word gives the user vividness, color, punch, and precision. It also seems that the clearer and more numerous our verbal images, the greater our intellectual power. Wheelock’s Latin is profuse with the etymological study of English and vocabulary enrichment. Our own experiences have shown that students will not only remember vocabulary words longer and better when they understand their etymologies, but also will use them with a sharper sense of meaning and nuance.

The solution to the problem of poor performance scores had been a new system of grading that would encourage students to stay in school as well as improve their self-esteem. Beyond these important, admirable goals, it also had a more immediate purpose: it would undoubtedly reduce the school’s notoriously high failure rate, which had become an embarrassment to the school and to the school board. Under the plan, equal weight was given to class participation (which to some teachers meant simply showing up, because how on earth were you supposed to quantify participation?), homework, weekly tests, and a final exam at the end of every six-week period. A student could flunk every weekly test as well as the final exam and still pass a course for that period.

What would a final exam look like in a course organized around a complex problem that must be considered in the light of several disciplines? Students would be asked to write an extended take-home essay about "what it means to be an American."-- and they would know from the first day of class that this was the final exam question. The second part of the final exam would require students to present and defend their papers in a public exhibition where parents would observe and ask questions. The Students’ oral and written work would be assessed on their ability to display a range of evidence to make their points. They would have to meet a performance standard to get a Merit Badge in American Studies.” -- this is the essence of the digital portfolio. (page 139)

It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength. My classmates and I would get higher scores—two hundred points, as promised—than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual strength but did not have the resources or, in some cases, even the awareness to acquire better form through high-priced prep courses. Because of the way the human mind works—the so-called “attribution effect,” which drives us to take personal credit for any success—those of us who prepped for the test would score higher and then walk into better opportunities thinking it was all about us: that we were better and smarter than the rest and we even had inarguable, quantifiable proof. Look at our scores!

Do you condemn the kids for not having been blessed with I.Q.s of 120? Can you condemn the kids? Can you condemn anyone? Can you condemn the colleges that give all you need to pass a board of education examination? Do you condemn the board of education for not making the exams stiffer, for not boosting the requirements, for not raising salaries, for not trying to attract better teachers, for not making sure their teachers are better equipped to teach? Or do you condemn the meatheads all over the world who drift into the teaching profession drift into it because it offers a certain amount of paycheck every month security ,vacation-every summer luxury, or a certain amount of power , or a certain easy road when the other more difficult roads are full of ruts? Oh he’d seen the meatheads, all right; he’d seen them in every education class he’d ever attended. The simpering female idiots who smiled and agreed with the instructor, who imparted vast knowledge gleaned from profound observations made while sitting at the back of the classroom in some ideal high school in some ideal neighborhood while an ideal teacher taught ideal students. Or the men who were perhaps the worst, the men who sometimes seemed a little embarrassed, over having chosen the easy road, the road the security, the men who sometimes made a joke about the women not realizing they themselves were poured from the same streaming cauldron of horse manure. Had Rick been one of these men? He did not believe so…. He had wanted to teach, had honestly wanted to teach. He had not considered the security or the two-month vacation, or the short tours. He had simply wanted to teach, and he had considred taeaching a worth-while profession. He had, in fact, considered it the worthiest profession. He had held no illusions about his own capabilities. He could not paint, or write, or compose, or sculpt, or philopshize deeply, or design tall buildings. He could contribute nothing to the world creatively and this had been a disappointment to him until he’d realized he could be a big creator by teaching. For here were minds to be sculptured, here were ideas to be painted, here were lives to shape. To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do.

(1) Phonological awareness is recognizing the sound structures of spoken language, not just the meanings it conveys. This is a reading prerequisite. (2) Phonemic awareness is the skill of recognizing and manipulating individual speech sounds or phonemes. Students must be able to segment words and syllables into phonemes to learn to read. (3) The Alphabetic Principle is the concept that printed language consists of alphabet letters that are deliberately and systematically related to the individual sounds of spoken language. Reading depends on understanding this concept. (4) Orthographic awareness is recognition of printed language structures, such as orthographic rules, patterns in spelling; derivational morphology and inflectional morphology, i.e. structural changes indicating word types and grammatical differences; and etymology, i.e. word and meaning

You may have seen, you must have seen, some of those awful text books written not by educators but by educationalists—by people who talk about books instead of talking within books. You may have been told by them that the chief aim of a great writer, and indeed the main clue to his greatness, is "simplicity." Traitors, not teachers. In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases—probably recollections from more tenderyears of schooling—as "his style is simple" or "his style is clear and simple" or "his style is beautiful and simple" or "his style is quite beautiful and simple." But remember that "simplicity" is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple.

I would've given up without her - not on you, never on you, but on myself. I suppose I can tell you this now, but I wasn't a very good student. I wasn't smart enough to just get by. I wasn't focused enough in class. I rarely passed exams. I skipped assignments. I was constantly on academic probation. Not that your grandmother would ever know, but at the time, I was thinking of doing what you were later accused of doing: selling all my belongings, sticking out my thumb, and hitchhiking to California to be with the other hippies who had dropped out and tuned in. Everything changed when I met your mother. She made me want things that I had never dreamed of wanting: a steady job, a reliable car, a mortgage, a family. You figured out a long time ago that you got your wanderlust from me. I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: That restless feeling dissolves like butter.

They tried to befriend the second-year cohort, too, a group of five white boys who lived just across the way on Merton Street. But this went south immediately when one of them, Philip Wright, told Robin at a faculty dinner that the first-year cohort was largely international only because of departmental politics. ‘The board of undergraduate studies is always fighting over whether to prioritize European languages, or other . . . more exotic languages. Chakravarti and Lovell have been making a stink about diversifying the student body for years. They didn’t like that my cohort are all Classicists. I assume they were overcorrecting with you.’ Robin tried to be polite. ‘I’m not sure why that’s such a bad thing.’ ‘Well, it’s not a bad thing per se, but it does mean spots taken away from equally qualified candidates who passed the entrance exams.’ ‘I didn’t take any entrance exams,’ said Robin. ‘Precisely.’ Philip sniffed, and did not say another word to Robin for the entire evening.

Grades can also be profoundly unfair, especially for students who are unable to keep up, because the level of the exams usually increases from week to week. Let’s take the analogy of video games. When you discover a new game, you initially have no idea how to progress effectively. Above all, you don’t want to be constantly reminded of how bad you are! That’s why video game designers start with extremely easy levels, where you are almost sure to win. Very gradually, the difficulty increases and, with it, the risk of failure and frustration—but programmers know how to mitigate this by mixing the easy with the difficult, and by leaving you free to retry the same level as many times as you need. You see your score steadily increase . . . and finally, the joyous day comes when you successfully pass the final level, where you were stuck for so long. Now compare this with the report cards of “bad” students: they start the year off with a bad grade, and instead of motivating them by letting them take the same test again until they pass, the teacher gives them a new exercise every week, almost always beyond their abilities. Week after week, their “score” hovers around zero. In the video game market, such a design would be a complete disaster. All too often, schools use grades as punishments.

Lukesagynecologist." "What?" Everly tilts her head like I'm talking crazy. "Luke is a gynecologist. At the student health clinic." "Shut the fuck up." I think I've managed to shock Everly. "I did not see this coming." She looks at me. "So?" "So?" I ask. "So you rescheduled the appointment with another doctor?" "No. I kept the appointment." "You kinky bitch, you did not! Stop it." "I did. I was already sitting on the exam table wearing a paper gown when he walked in. What was I supposed to do?" "Was it good for you?" She grins at me suggestively. "Everly!" "Bitch, I know you enjoyed it. At least a little." "You think there's something wrong with me, don't you?" "Sophie, no. That guy has no business being a gynecologist. It's not fair to women." "I think he's technically an obstetrician." "Same difference." "The nurse said he runs a department at the hospital.” "Well done, Sophie. When you crush, you crush classy." "Ugh." I cringe. "That reminds me. Do you keep your socks on during a gynecologist exam?" "Off. So, did you get your prescription?" "Yeah." I nod. "And a bag full of condoms." I pat my backpack. "Aww. Dr. Luke cares about your safety." "You understand I am never waiting on him again, right?" "Oh, yeah. I figured that out about thirty seconds into this conversation.

Sometimes when we’re being tested by discouragement, it seems God is silent. We pray and we don’t hear anything. We read the Scripture and still come away feeling like God is a million miles away. But remember, this is a test. When you’re in school, teachers never talk during tests. They stand up at the front of the room very quietly just watching all of the students taking the exam. The teachers have been preparing you in the days and weeks prior to the test. Often, they’ve put in extra hours making sure everyone has the opportunity to succeed. On test day, they want to see if you’ve learned the lessons. They know that you have the information you need. They know you’re prepared. You’re ready. Now all you’ve got to do is put into practice what you’ve learned. God works the same way as your teachers here on earth. When He is silent, don’t assume He has left you. He is right there with you during the test. The silence means only that God has prepared you, and now He is watching to see if you have learned. He would not give you the test unless He knew you were ready. God is not mad at you when He is silent. He has not forsaken you. His silence is a sign that He has great confidence in you. He knows you have what it takes. He knows you will come through the test victoriously or He would not have permitted you to be tested.

So, are you going to tell her?” Mark asked. He was, and still is, a persistent person. Good question, I thought as I stared blankly into space. Am I going to march up to Martina Elizabeth and tell her that I love her? I pondered the question carefully as though it was part of some unscheduled final exam. Instead of answers, however, all I could come up with was a series of dilemmas. I noticed that Mark was still staring at me with a quizzical look on his face. “What?” I yelped. “You haven’t answered my question, man,” I looked down, inhaled deeply, looked up and exhaled very slowly. “I, uh, don’t know.” I turned my gaze to my lunch tray, the other tables, and the clock on the wall. Anything to avoid my best friend’s inquisitive gaze. “I’ll take that as a resounding ‘no,’” Mark said. “I didn’t say that.” “No,” Mark said, “but it’s what you meant to say.” “I – I can’t tell her. Not now.” “Why the fuck not?” Mark asked, his voice rising in pitch and volume. A group of student journalists from The Serpent’s Tale – Alan Goode, Francisco Vargas, Juan Calderon and Roger Lawrence – looked at us with bemused expressions from one of the neighboring tables. Mark noticed, cleared his throat and lowered his voice to a half-whisper. “Why don’t you tell her, you dumbass?” “I can’t,” I repeated, shaking my head emphatically. “What are you so afraid of?” Another good question. “Nothing…everything,” I replied. “What, pray tell, do you mean?” Mark asked. “Are you more afraid that she doesn’t like you, or that she does?

They taught him how to milk cows and now they expected him to tame lions. Perhaps they expected him to behave like all good lion tamers. Use a whip and a chair. But what happens to the best lion tamer when he puts down his whip and his chair. Goddamnit! It was wrong. He felt cheated, he felt almost violated. He felt cheated for himself, and he felt cheated for guys like Joshua Edwards who wanted to teach and who didn’t know how to teach because he’d been pumped full of manure and theoretical hogwash. Why hadn’t anyone told them, in plain, frank English, just what to do? Couldn’t someone, somewhere along the line, have told them? Not one single college instructor? Not someone from the board of Ed, someone to orientate them after they’d passed the emergency exam? Not anyone? Now one sonofabitch somewhere who gave a good goddamn? Not even Stanley? Not even Small? Did they have to figure it out for themselves, sink and swim, kill or be killed? Rick had never been told how to stop in his class. He’d never been told what to do with a second term student who doesn’t even know how to write down his own goddamn name on a sheet of paper. He didn’t know, he’d never been advised on the proper tactics for dealing with a boy whose I.Q. was 66, a big, fat, round, moronic 66. He hadn’t been taught about kids’ yelling out in class, not one kid, not the occasional “difficult child” the ed courses had loftily philosophized about, not him. But a whole goddamn, shouting, screaming class load of them all yelling their sonofbitching heads off. What do you do with a kid who can’t read even though he’s fifteen years old? Recommend him for special reading classes, sure. And what do you do when those special reading classes are loaded to the asshole, packed because there are kids who can’t read in abundance, and you have to take only those who can’t read the worst, dumping them onto a teacher who’s already overloaded and those who doesn’t want to teach a remedial class to begin with? And what do you with that poor ignorant jerk? Do you call him on class, knowing damn well he hasn’t read the assignment because he doesn’t know how to read? Or do you ignore him? Or do you ask him to stop by after school, knowing he would prefer playing stickball to learning how to read. And knowing he considers himself liberated the moment the bell sounds at the end of the eighth period. What do you do when you’ve explained something patiently and fully, explained it just the way you were taught to explain in your education courses, explained in minute detail, and you look out at your class and see that stretching, vacant wall of blank, blank faces and you know nothing has penetrated, not a goddamn thing has sunk in? What do you do then? Give them all board erasers to clean. What do you do when you call on a kid and ask “What did that last passage mean?”and the kid stands there without any idea of what the passage meant , and you know that he’s not alone, you know every other kid in the class hasn’t the faintest idea either? What the hell do you do then? Do you go home and browse through the philosophy of education books the G.I bill generously provided. Do you scratch your ugly head and seek enlightenment from the educational psychology texts? Do you consult Dewey? And who the hell do you condemn, just who? Do you condemn elementary schools for sending a kid on to high school without knowing how to read, without knowing how to write his own name on a piece of paper? Do you condemn the masterminds who plot the education systems of a nation, or a state or a city?

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

Besides, it’s not as big a deal as people make it out to be. You just have to be prepared to answer any question on any of the four hundred books you’ve read so far in graduate school. And if you get it wrong, they kick you out,” she said. He fixed her with a look of barely contained awe while she stirred the salad around her plate with the tines of her fork. She smiled at him. Part of learning to be a professor was learning to behave in a professorial way. Thomas could not be permitted to see how afraid she was. The oral qualifying exam is usually a turning point—a moment when the professoriate welcomes you as a colleague rather than as an apprentice. More infamously, the exam can also be the scene of spectacular intellectual carnage, as the unprepared student—conscious but powerless—witnesses her own professional vivisection. Either way, she will be forced to face her inadequacies. Connie was a careful, precise young woman, not given to leaving anything to chance. As she pushed the half-eaten salad across the table away from the worshipful Thomas, she told herself that she was as prepared as it was possible to be. In her mind ranged whole shelvesful of books, annotated and bookmarked, and as she set aside her luncheon fork she roamed through the shelves of her acquired knowledge, quizzing herself. Where are the economics books? Here. And the books on costume and material culture? One shelf over, on the left. A shadow of doubt crossed her face. But what if she was not prepared enough? The first wave of nausea contorted her stomach, and her face grew paler. Every year, it happened to someone. For years she had heard the whispers about students who had cracked, run sobbing from the examination room, their academic careers over before they had even begun. There were really only two ways that this could go. Her performance today could, in theory, raise her significantly in departmental regard. Today, if she handled herself correctly, she would be one step closer to becoming a professor. Or she would look in the shelves

Sometimes when we’re being tested by discouragement, it seems God is silent. We pray and we don’t hear anything. We read the Scripture and still come away feeling like God is a million miles away. But remember, this is a test. When you’re in school, teachers never talk during tests. They stand up at the front of the room very quietly just watching all of the students taking the exam. The teachers have been preparing you in the days and weeks prior to the test. Often, they’ve put in extra hours making sure everyone has the opportunity to succeed. On test day, they want to see if you’ve learned the lessons. They know that you have the information you need. They know you’re prepared. You’re ready. Now all you’ve got to do is put into practice what you’ve learned. God works the same way as your teachers here on earth. When He is silent, don’t assume He has left you. He is right there with you during the test. The silence means only that God has prepared you, and now He is watching to see if you have learned. He would not give you the test unless He knew you were ready. God is not mad at you when He is silent. He has not forsaken you. His silence is a sign that He has great confidence in you. He knows you have what it takes. He knows you will come through the test victoriously or He would not have permitted you to be tested. The key is to remain upbeat and not be discouraged or bitter. Put into practice what you’ve learned. Stay in faith. Hang on to your happiness. Treat others kindly. Be a blessing. If you do that, you will pass the test and flourish in a new season. God will bring things out of you that you didn’t even know were in you. Understand, if you don’t allow the enemy to discourage you, one of his greatest weapons has been lost. Today is a new day. God is breathing new hope into your heart and new vision into your spirit. He is the Glory and the lifter of our heads. Look up with a fresh vision, and God will do for you what He promised David. He will lift you out of the pit. He will set your feet on a rock. He will put a new song in your heart. You won’t drag through life defeated and depressed. You will soar through life full of joy, full of faith, full of victory.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

The fact that no one made demands on her knowledge in her special field was lucky for Simochka. Not only she but many of her girlfriends had graduated from the institute without any such knowledge. There were many reasons for this. The young girls had come from high schools with very little grounding in mathematics and physics. They had learned in the upper grades that at faculty council meetings the school director had scolded the teachers for giving out failing marks, and that even if a pupil didn't study at all he received a diploma. In the institute, when they found time to sit down to study, they made their way through the mathematics and radio-technology as through a dense pine forest. But more often there was no time at all. Every fall for a month or more the students were taken to collective farms to harvest potatoes. For this reason, they had to attend lectures for eight and ten hours a day all the rest of the year, leaving no time to study their course work. On Monday evenings there was political indoctrination. Once a week a meeting of some kind was obligatory. Then one had to do socially useful work, too: issue bulletins, organize concerts, and it was also necessary to help at home, to shop, to wash, to dress. And what about the movies? And the theater? And the club? If a girl didn't have some fun and dance a bit during her student years, when would she do so afterward? For their examinations Simochka and her girlfriends wrote many cribs, which they hid in those sections of female clothing denied to males, and at the exams they pulled out the one the needed, smoothed it out, and turned it in as a work sheet. The examiners, of course, could have easily discovered the women students' ignorance, but they themselves were overburdened with committee meetings, assemblies, a variety of plans and reports to the dean's office and to the rector. It was hard on them to have to give an examination a second time. Besides, when their students failed, the examiners were reprimanded as if the failures were spoiled goods in a production process—according to the well-known theory that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. Therefore the examiners did not try to trip the students up but, in fact, attempted to get them through the examination with as good results as possible.

Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.

When we reflect on our daily lives, we might look back at a day that was very stressful and think, “Well, that wasn’t my favorite day this week.” When you’re in the middle of one of those days, you might long for a day with less stress in it. But if you put a wider lens on your life and subtract every day that you have experienced as stressful, you won’t find yourself with an ideal life. Instead, you’ll find yourself also subtracting the experiences that have helped you grow, the challenges you are most proud of, and the relationships that define you. You may have spared yourself some discomfort, but you will also have robbed yourself of some meaning. And yet, it’s not at all uncommon to wish for a life without stress. While this is a natural desire, pursuing it comes at a heavy cost. In fact, many of the negative outcomes we associate with stress may actually be the consequence of trying to avoid it. Psychologists have found that trying to avoid stress leads to a significantly reduced sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Avoiding stress can also be isolating. In a study of students at Doshisha University in Japan, the goal to avoid stress predicted a drop, over time, in their sense of connection and belonging. Having such a goal can even exhaust you. For example, researchers at the University of Zurich asked students about their goals, then tracked them for one month. Across two typically stressful periods—end-of-semester exams and the winter holidays—those with the strongest desire to avoid stress were the most likely to report declines in concentration, physical energy, and self-control. One particularly impressive study conducted through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in Palo Alto, California, followed more than one thousand adults for ten years. At the beginning of the study, researchers asked the participants about how they dealt with stress. Those who reported trying to avoid stress were more likely to become depressed over the following decade. They also experienced increasing conflict at work and at home, and more negative outcomes, such as being fired or getting divorced. Importantly, avoiding stress predicted the increase in depression, conflict, and negative events above and beyond any symptoms or difficulties reported at the beginning of the study. Wherever a participant started in life, the tendency to avoid stress made things worse over the next decade. Psychologists call this vicious cycle stress generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you. As the stress piles up, you become increasingly overwhelmed and isolated, and therefore even more likely to rely on avoidant coping strategies, like trying to steer clear of stressful situations or to escape your feelings with self-destructive distractions. The more firmly committed you are to avoiding stress, the more likely you are to find yourself in this downward spiral. As psychologists Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci write in The Exploration of Happiness, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.

Are you Hilary Westfield?” She sounded like she hoped it wasn’t the case. Hilary nodded. “Oh. Well, I’m Philomena. I have to show you to your room.” Hilary looked wildly at Miss Greyson. “I’m Miss Westfield’s governess,” Miss Greyson said, to Hilary’s relief. Maybe talking politely to people like Philomena was something you learned at Miss Pimm’s, or maybe getting past Philomena was a sort of entrance exam. “Is there any chance we could see Miss Pimm? We’re old acquaintances. I used to go to school here, you see.” Miss Greyson smiled for the second time that day—the world was getting stranger and stranger by the minute—but Philomena didn’t smile back. “I’m terribly sorry,” said Philomena, “but Miss Pimm doesn’t receive visitors. You can leave Miss Westfield with me, and the porter will collect Miss Westfield’s bags.” She raised her eyebrows as the carriage driver deposited the golden traveling trunk on the doorstep. “I hope you have another pair of stockings in there.” “I do.” Hilary met Philomena’s stare. “I have nineteen pairs, in fact. And a sword.” Miss Greyson groaned and put her hand to her forehead. “Excuse me?” said Philomena. “I’m afraid Miss Westfield is prone to fits of imagination,” Miss Greyson said quickly. Philomena’s eyebrows retreated. “I understand completely,” she said. “Well, you have nothing to worry about. Miss Pimm’s will cure her of that nasty habit soon enough. Now, Miss Westfield, please come along with me.” Hilary and Miss Greyson started to follow Philomena inside. “Only students and instructors are permitted inside the school building,” said Philomena to Miss Greyson. “With all the thefts breaking out in the kingdom these days, one really can’t be too careful. But you’re perfectly welcome to say your good-byes outside.” Miss Greyson agreed and knelt down in front of Hilary. “A sword?” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Miss Greyson.” “All I ask is that you take care not to carve up your classmates. If I were not a governess, however, I might mention that the lovely Philomena is in need of a haircut.” Hilary nearly laughed, but she suspected it might be against the rules to laugh on the grounds of Miss Pimm’s, so she gave Miss Greyson her most solemn nod instead. “Now,” said Miss Greyson, “you must promise to write. You must keep up with the news of the day and tell me all about it in your letters. And you’ll come and visit me in my bookshop at the end of the term, won’t you?” “Of course.” Hilary’s stomach was starting to feel very strange, and she didn’t trust herself to say more than a few words at a time. This couldn’t be right; pirates were hardly ever sentimental. Then again, neither was Miss Greyson. Yet here she was, leaning forward to hug Hilary, and Hilary found herself hugging Miss Greyson back. “Please don’t tell me to be a good little girl,” she said. Miss Greyson sniffed and stood up. “My dear,” she said, “I would never dream of it.” She gave Hilary’s canvas bag an affectionate pat, nodded politely to Philomena, and walked down the steps and through the gate, back to the waiting carriage. “Come along,” said Philomena, picking up the lightest of Hilary’s bags. “And please don’t dawdle. I have lessons to finish.” HILARY FOLLOWED PHILOMENA through a maze of dark stone walls and high archways. From the inside, the building seemed more like a fortress

If they’re forced into a challenge they don’t feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”: deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well. Self-handicapping can be fairly spectacular: in one study, men deliberately chose performance-inhibiting drugs when facing a task they didn’t expect to do well on.7 “Instead of studying,” writes the psychologist Edward Hirt, “a student goes to a movie the night before an exam. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying.”8 Writers who don’t produce copy—or leave it so long that they couldn’t possibly produce something good—are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding. “Work finally begins,” says Alain de Botton, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.” For people with an extremely fixed mind-set, that tipping point quite often never happens. They fear nothing so much as finding out that they never had what it takes.

Hence [through No Child Left Behind] the state has been given power...to fire all teachers and principles. So here we have an unusual case in which the students are engaged in the performances, but the high stakes have been displaced onto the teachers who are preparing their charges for the exams.

Other studies show that plastic changes in the brain can even be observed after just a few months. For instance, in 2006, researchers imaged the brains of German medical students three months before their medical exam, and again right after the exam, and then compared the brains of these students to the brains of students who were not studying for the exam at this time. The results: Medical students’ brains showed changes in regions of the parietal cortex as well as in the posterior hippocampus. As you can probably guess, these regions are known to be involved in memory and learning.

A Hard Left For High-School History The College Board version of our national story BY STANLEY KURTZ | 1215 words AT the height of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservatives were alive to the dangers of a leftist takeover of American higher education. Today, with the coup all but complete, conservatives take the loss of the academy for granted and largely ignore it. Meanwhile, America’s college-educated Millennial generation drifts ever farther leftward. Now, however, an ambitious attempt to force a leftist tilt onto high-school U.S.-history courses has the potential to shake conservatives out of their lethargy, pulling them back into the education wars, perhaps to retake some lost ground. The College Board, the private company that develops the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) exams, recently ignited a firestorm by releasing, with little public notice, a lengthy, highly directive, and radically revisionist “framework” for teaching AP U.S. history. The new framework replaces brief guidelines that once allowed states, school districts, and teachers to present U.S. history as they saw fit. The College Board has promised to generate detailed guidelines for the entire range of AP courses (including government and politics, world history, and European history), and in doing so it has effectively set itself up as a national school board. Dictating curricula for its AP courses allows the College Board to circumvent state standards, virtually nationalizing America’s high schools, in violation of cherished principles of local control. Unchecked, this will result in a high-school curriculum every bit as biased and politicized as the curriculum now dominant in America’s colleges. Not coincidentally, David Coleman, the new head of the College Board, is also the architect of the Common Core, another effort to effectively nationalize American K–12 education, focusing on English and math skills. As president of the College Board, Coleman has found a way to take control of history, social studies, and civics as well, pushing them far to the left without exposing himself to direct public accountability. Although the College Board has steadfastly denied that its new AP U.S. history (APUSH) guidelines are politically biased, the intellectual background of the effort indicates otherwise. The early stages of the APUSH redesign overlapped with a collaborative venture between the College Board and the Organization of American Historians to rework U.S.-history survey courses along “internationalist” lines. The goal was to undercut anything that smacked of American exceptionalism, the notion that, as a nation uniquely constituted around principles of liberty and equality, America stands as a model of self-government for the world. Accordingly, the College Board’s new framework for AP U.S. history eliminates the traditional emphasis on Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon and its echoes in American history. The Founding itself is demoted and dissolved within a broader focus on transcontinental developments, chiefly the birth of an exploitative international capitalism grounded in the slave trade. The Founders’ commitment to republican principles is dismissed as evidence of a benighted belief in European cultural superiority. Thomas Bender, the NYU historian who leads the Organization of American Historians’ effort to globalize and denationalize American history, collaborated with the high-school and college teachers who eventually came to lead the College Board’s APUSH redesign effort. Bender frames his movement as a counterpoint to the exceptionalist perspective that dominated American foreign policy during the George W. Bush ad ministration. Bender also openly hopes that students exposed to his approach will sympathize with Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution rather than with Justice Antonin Scalia�

In Gadsden County, Florida, for example, students were required to take a total of 242 standardized exams between kindergarten and their high school graduation day, according to a recent study by the conservative Foundation for Excellence in Education.

Too common is the experience of a college professor answering a knock on her office door only to find a first-year student in distress, asking to discuss his low grade on the first test in introductory psychology. How is it possible? He attended all the lectures and took diligent notes on them. He read the text and highlighted the critical passages. How did he study for the test? she asks. Well, he’d gone back and highlighted his notes, and then reviewed the highlighted notes and his highlighted text material several times until he felt he was thoroughly familiar with all of it. How could it be that he had pulled a D on the exam? Had he used the set of key concepts in the back of each chapter to test himself? Could he look at a concept like “conditioned stimulus,” define it, and use it in a paragraph? While he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points of the text into a series of questions and then later tried to answer them while he was studying? Had he at least rephrased the main ideas in his own words as he read? Had he tried to relate them to what he already knew? Had he looked for examples outside the text? The answer was no in every case. He sees himself as the model student, diligent to a fault, but the truth is he doesn’t know how to study effectively.

South Carolina’s fourth-grade music exam, administered via computer, asks: “When singing a melody together with a friend, what dynamic level should you sing? A) Louder than your friend B) Not too loud and not too soft C) Softer than your friend or D) the same as your friend.” (The correct answer is D.) Students are then shown a measure of sheet music and asked to identify which of four electronic recordings matches the notation.

In September 1937, I started my last year of high school, the most difficult year of all. In order to graduate, one had to pass the matriculation examination called also matura. That was the monster at the end of the twelfth grade. How can one imagine to-day a comprehensive exam in almost all the subjects of the last four years? Students usually started to cram from January on. The exam was held at the end of June.

The students from the literary section had three written tests: Romanian, French and Latin; the scientific section needed math instead of Latin. Most of us had private tutoring in French and Latin for a few months before the matura. About a third of the candidates failed the written exam. The ones who succeeded took the orals. They were held in a large auditorium, at a high school and were open to the public. Five candidates faced a committee of eight teachers; the head of the committee was a university professor. None of the teachers were from our town. The orals took four to five hours, one group in the morning, another in the afternoon. The results were announced daily, late in the evening.

Before the two days of exams, I slept just a few hours nightly, for the number of books to be read was insane and I made a maximum effort. After all, how could I dare disappoint my family? How could I disappoint Max, who paid my tuition? Yet, I don't know how I accomplished it. I was like caught in a whirlpool and kept going, going. I remember, one night, my Mother woke up at 4 a.m. and asked me why I was up so early, yet I had not gone to sleep yet. I had to finish a novel every day, no matter how long it took. Some impressions about Columbia. The dean, who advised me what courses to take, was none other than Prof. Oscar Hamilton, a famous Shakespearean scholar. He took time to talk to me about my interests and my former studies. I told him about my abiding interest in the theater and thus he recommended me to take the Drama course taught by Joseph Wood Krutch. He was, by that time, an influential drama critic and a most admired professor. At the first lecture I realized what a gold mine I had struck. A big lecture hall was completely filled, half were probably not his students. People just flocked to hear him.

Some of the professors were great scholars, but dry as bone. I had no personal contact with any of them, except for the woman teacher, who led our seminar and was my thesis adviser. Since I had no exams, the contact with the teachers was non-existent. All were lecture classes, with great numbers of students - candidates for masters and ph.d. degrees. The seminar group had some cohesion, as we were all preparing for the same final exam and also presented topics for class discussion. Of the dozen participants in the seminar, about half were Jewish. After the Second World War, all those returned from the service were entitled to free education, under a new G.I. bill of rights. The soldiers of yesterday became the students of most colleges and universities, including the Ivy League schools. That law opened widely the doors of academic institutions to students of all social and religious backgrounds.

What was the importance of this exam? It enabled a young man or woman to study at a university, to go into a profession. My inclination was toward medicine but there was no faculty in town and there were no chances to be admitted in Bucharest. The faculties of medicine and engineering were practically closed to Jewish students. A strict "numerus clausus" assigned a tiny percentage to Jewish applicants, perhaps two or three percent of an incoming class. That left law and teaching as the only choices. The chances became remote that one could even teach at a state school, thus one chose to study languages, mathematics or law. In case of emigration, languages and math were useful skills. School became the outside world that hardened you for the years to come. I registered as a student of foreign languages: French, German and I started to study English.